For anyone who curious to know what kind of products that Bluelounge make, now is the best time to take a look or even buy one!
By inputting this coupon code during checkout, you wil get a $10 off any purchase of $50 or more: LD2008
This code is only valid until Sept 1, 2008.
Website: www.shopify.com
[rating: 4.5/5]
A shop in minutes, a business for life. JadedPixel, developer of Shopify, is certainly not exaggerating its tagline, you really can set up your online store in minutes.
It all started a year ago. I had zero experience on working with e-commerce system. I always thought it had to be customized by someone who had absolute knowledge of programming that supports the system, whether it was PHP, ASP, anything. Surprisingly, it only took a few days to fully understand how the themes work and I could create a customized theme in a few days. Note, you can start building your online shop using the provided default themes.
Customization
Just like stated above, it is super easy to learn and create a new theme. It uses its own Liquid templatling system for dynamic content, but believe me it is easy to understand. Of course you still definitely need to have at least an understanding of (x)HTML, CSS and basic programming algorithm.
You only need to modify 6 or 7 theme files and one CSS file, compared to dozens on most of other similar systems. Worth to note, it is also convenient to add a customized JavaScript modules without interfering with the rest of system most of the time
Backend Admin
This is also one of the biggest point why we love it so much. The look and feel is very clean. AJAX support makes it possible to drag and drop to sort your products.
Shopify's Admin interface screenshot
Support
The first place you need to go when you are experiencing any problem or bug is their forums which can be a good or a bad thing. The good thing is there are so many nice and skilled people on the community that will gladly share their knowledge and help you out. The bad thing, you just sometimes need a direct respond and explanations from the developers and it may take a while to get their attention.
Improvement
Shopify is growing along with your business. There are countless updates and new features that have been added since the first time we use it, and they plan to keep on doing it. Although there are some features that we wish they should have added, but not yet. They listen to their customers, so I am sure one day they will be added.
Price
Shopify offers a very unique pricing. You only pay a very reasonable monthly fee plus a small percentage of your transaction fee (ranging from 0.5% to 2%). This makes sense, if you want to start your first online business you possibly do not want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollar each month. You can check their detailed pricing plans here.
Final Words
I have worked partially with other systems since then, nothing is as simple as Shopify. It really stands with its concept, to make everything as easy as possible. For a small and medium business, Shopify is perfect! But if you need more detailed features like bulk shipping update, more flexible coupon code creation options or customer membership, you might have to wait until they include them to the system.
Hocus Focus is a photo studio located in Senayan City, Jakarta. They offer new concept of children photography, babies, toodler, family picture, maternity and pregnancy.
Their site includes a gallery of their portfolio, contact info and promotions. Check it out: http://www.hocusfocuskids.com.
After spending years of layouting using tables in HTML, I decided to start working on my coming web projects using full XHTML/CSS. This would be a big step to keep up with the dynamics of WWW. I know it’s old news and kind of a bit late, but better than never.
For the others who are also interested with this new web standard, I recommend Professional CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design as a reference book. Of all the books I’ve read about XHTML and CSS, this one gave me the best view and understanding as the writers give real life example with very detailed descriptions for implementing them. Even for non-experienced web designers or people who just started learning about web design, I would still recommend it as the first chapter explains all the basics to create a web project.
The other problem that has been holding me back to start was the supporting application. As powerful as Macromedia/Adobe Dreamweaver can be for a WYSIWYG HTML editor, it still lacks the support for full XHTML/CSS layouting. Finally, after months of searching and trying, I found West Civ’s Style Master (available for both Win and Mac). I have only tried it for a few hours, but already find almost all of the required features for the transition. Hope this is the app I’ve been looking for, or hopefully Adobe make a new breakthrough when they release the next version of Dreamweaver.
